From a neighbour, I got a one-day-old duckling and found, to my intense joy, that it transferred its following response to my person. At the same time, my interest became irreversibly fixated on water fowl, and I became an expert on their behaviour even as a child.
Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.
Paris's neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl - a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig's tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20.
Browning butter affects more than just the color and the flavor of its milk solids; the water that butter contains also simmers away.
Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.
I flipped through a book on harp seals in the late 1970s and saw images of them swimming in emerald green pools of water surrounded by huge sheets of ice. Right then I was hooked, and I knew this was a story I wanted to do.
Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
I could float in the pool for hours, just letting the water carry me.
Squid experts have been debating for some time about whether the giant squid is a passive predator that just floats around in the water and waits to bump into something. I was never one to imagine it to be passive.
There's something clean, simple, and even detoxifying about a loaf that contains nothing more than the best stone-ground, whole-meal flour, salt, yeast and water.
Replacing white flour with whole wheat generally makes baked goods denser, drier, and more crumbly because the germ and bran in whole wheat absorbs more water.
My father, who was a hair colourist, died when I was young, so my mother had to work very hard. But at the same time, I do believe that if you have everything, it is easy to make a dinner. When you only have flour and water and olives and potatoes, you have to be much more creative, and that's what my mother is all about.
The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.
I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.
To make fluffy scrambled eggs, the best trick is to whisk in a splash of water and nothing else. Cream, milk, and other liquids drag the eggs down!
Once, I was coming back from school, and there was this guy who was eve-teasing me and my friend. I had a Milton water bottle that I flung it at his face. My dad told me if you are in a crowded place and a guy eve-teases, you should make noise. I did exactly that and got people on the road to beat up the guy.
I didn't go to high school. I think that after you learn to read and write and do your numbers and flush the toilet behind yourself, you don't need no more schoolin'. You need to get out in the water and swim.
Some countries have more water than others - some can afford to use clean water to flush their poop away, and some can't.
